Student Success
Goal 1: Work toward equity and justice in all SOE programs.
Strategies
- Work toward greater inclusion of historically excluded applicants.
- Increase the marketing to and level of active recruitment efforts across SOE programs targeting historically excluded students.
- Create a position for a student services representative to advise, mentor, and support international students to increase retention.
- Advocate and provide additional mentoring and support as needed for historically excluded students during their field placements.
- Increase scholarships, fellowships, and grants to support historically excluded students financially.
- Reexamine currently existing application protocols focusing on culturally sustainable practices.
- Encourage faculty to deliberate holistically upon applications without giving disproportionate weight to GRE scores.
Strategies:
- Work with the SOE, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and Access Committee and other SOE leaders to find actionable practices that will allow the SOE to increase alignment of the community’s teaching with the IU and SOE’s anti-racist agenda.
- Hold faculty workshops on DEI in course design, including learning outcomes, assessment practices, course resources and activities, and student support. Support instructor collaboratives and other professional development activities on embedding DEI core values into their teaching practices (e.g., an Equity Champions program). Offer incentives for faculty to attend these workshops.
- Add a required open-ended question to the SOE course evaluations relating to how well students feel their instructors created and supported an equitable learning environment.
- Dedicate resources to collect and report department level DEI-related data on classroom climate and teaching practices.
Strategies:
- Provide affordable opportunities for students to experience a range of in and out of class culturally diverse experiences including short-term study abroad opportunities.
- Work toward greater inclusion of students participating in the Global Gateways program.
Strategies:
- Utilize existing funds and advocate for additional resources to support the hiring of historically excluded groups.
- Advocate for transparent, non-biased, non-racist search, screening, and hiring practices at all position levels (tenure and non-tenure track faculty and adjuncts, support and professional staff, part-time, and full-time), including how job opportunities are posted and advertised, negotiated, and offered.
Goal 2: Evaluate issues of availability and affordability of high quality pre-service and professional development programs in the SOE, address issues by revisioning existing programs and adding new ones while maintaining our reputation as a leading school of education.
Strategies:
- Seek additional scholarship funding for undergraduates and master’s degree students from donors, agencies, and foundations that support the preparation of education professionals.
- Increase the number of fellowships and student-academic contracts available to doctoral students.
Strategies:
- Revise some existing programs and courses and create new ones that are offered evenings and weekends, part-time, and/or fully online.
- Create affordable pathways to earn credentials that can stack together towards the earning of master’s degrees.
- Streamline the approval process for launching new courses and programs, while maintaining the care and integrity of the process to assure high quality.
- Actively identify and regularly celebrate successful and innovative ways this goal has been addressed and achieved among the SOE community.
- Work with the Faculty Affairs and Development committees to address faculty merit review structures that will better honor the work of creating greater accessibility of courses and programs, and for teaching and advising within them.
- Adjust staffing patterns for after-hours and evening virtual advising and meetings with student support personnel for non-resident and working students.
Strategies:
- Increase resources available to help students succeed by investing in and growing a student ambassador program with greater focus on serving online students.
- Use data to proactively identify ways to improve student success.
- Consistently increase student enrollments through innovative and inclusive recruitment practices.
- Involve more faculty and education professionals in local, state, and professional organizations in the recruiting process.
Goal 3: Build upon current initiatives and encourage the development of new majors, minors, certificates, and other professional development opportunities that utilize existing courses and components of established programs across the School of Education and campus wide.
Strategies:
- Conduct market research including peer institutions to establish the need and feasibility of new accelerated master’s degree programs, as well as non-teaching majors and minors targeting students in and outside the state of Indiana.
- Include educational professionals and other stakeholders with faculty and staff in determining the need for and considering the feasibility of addressing these needs with high quality coursework and programs.
- Incentivize the faculty through summer support, course buyouts or other appropriate means to engage in this work.
- Identify ways to fairly compensate faculty for coordination of existing and new programs.
Strategies:
- Establish a web-based application system through which individuals can apply to be considered for part-time, short-term contract work.
- Create and maintain a database of names, contact information, and vitae of individuals interested in and qualified to teach, and/or to supervise field. experiences, student teaching, independent research projects, and internships, and to serve on master’s and EdD research committees.
Goal 4: Become a leader in the design and use of technology-enhanced active learning spaces to support high-quality teaching.
Strategies:
- Leverage IU’s Mosaic Active Learning initiative to ensure all classrooms in the Wright Education building have modern furniture and current technology to support active learning.
- Study use of the experimental classroom spaces in the Wright Education building to identify and share best practices.
- Lead the evolution of course design through dissemination of impactful research.